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Batavia Corner Indonesian Restaurant, Victoria Park

Batavia Corner Indonesian Restaurant is located on Albany Highway, cornering Dane Street in East Victoria Park. I was wondering whether ‘Batavia’ meant anything special in Indonesian and discovered that it’s the former name for Jakarta from the period 1619 – 1942 (information courtesy of Wikipedia). A very aptly named restaurant!

Batavia Corner is a small and semi open-aired restaurant, fitting roughly 50 – 60 people if you include the tables outside. Order has to be placed and paid at the counter with free offer of sauces and water on the side for your taking. This is the second time I have dined in this restaurant, the first a couple of years back when it recently opened. I remembered not really liking the food, but chance had it that we ended up lunching here this time round so I thought I should give it a second try.

The dishes came and looked quite promising. I had the Nasi Uduk Komplitas the variety of food in the one dish attracted me reading off the menu. However, chomping into the food, I got sorely disappointed. First of all, if you look closely at the veggies they offered as part of the dish, they were only a few strands of lettuce and one piece of cucumber. Surely this is not fitting for an authentic Indonesian dish? Also the tofu was dry and the chicken and beef were overfried which made them super tough to eat! Not very enjoyable at all. Looking at my friend, it didn’t look like he enjoyed his meal that much either and commented that maybe we should have ordered individual dishes instead as we saw some of the food on nearby tables (such as the Nasi Goreng, Gado Gado, Rendang etc) and they looked better than ours.

As for service, it’s pretty much a self-service restaurant but they do bring out the dishes to your table. Prices are reasonable for lunch. I’d read mixed review about this place ranging from food court quality to excellent, best Indonesian food – Karen Cheng (the famous award winning blogger) thought this place was great..she must have known what to order. As for me, I will probably not return to this place for awhile.